The Sad Sweet Song of Mac Schweitzer: Rediscovery of a Southwest Legend

After Mac (Mary Alice Cox) Schweitzer was found dead in her car on the Navajo Indian Reservation in 1962, her career as a modernist painter was largely forgotten. Through a turn of luck, her son Kit married an anthropologist named Ann Lane Hedlund. Anthropologists are good observers and storytellers and now—years later—Hedlund is bringing the artist back on stage in a significant new book from University of Arizona Press: Mac Schweitzer: A Southwest Maverick and Her Art.

An accompanying exhibition opens at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West in October, 2025. With its mix of wilderness and mystery, Mac’s story has been compared to that of disappeared poet and artist Everett Ruess. The title above is borrowed from one of Mac’s later paintings, The Sad Sweet Song of the Birds. I had the chance to ask Ann Hedlund how she managed the sensitive task of telling her late mother-in-law’s story. See her answers, below.

Q: Did you know of Mac before you ever met Kit? Was she (or is she today) known in Tucson circles?

Ann Hedlund: When I first moved to Tucson in January 1977, it was to work at the Arizona State Museum with their Southwestern textile collections. I’d never heard of Mac Schweitzer (1921-1962) but knew that Tucson was a lively mid-century arts colony that, while not rivaling those of Santa Fe, Taos and Scottsdale, had lots of cachet, lots of intriguing exchanges between the artists and anthropologists of the day. Mac was a prominent member of that fascinating and powerful group, but I didn’t know that until meeting her son Kit later in 1977, fifteen years after Mac died. And I didn’t learn how well-known in art circles she was until I started researching this book in earnest. Today, Mac is remembered mostly by those who collected or have inherited her works—her legacy disappeared when she died at age 40 in 1962, because no one promoted or showed her art in public. Writing this book involved discovering how lively and productive this forgotten artist was, how well-recognized in her own time, and how worthy of attention her efforts are once again today.

How did you and Kit meet? Was his mother a big topic of conversation between you? (“She starred in many family stories.”) Did her art surround you in your house?

Kit and I met at a potluck party through a mutual friend who thought we might get along given our Southwest cultural interests; the next week we happened to meet again by chance at a folk festival called Tucson Meet Yourself and, on the spot, he invited me on a four-day, three-night “date” to attend the winter Shalako ceremonies at Zuni Pueblo. He and I went with two other friends and our conversations on that trip never slowed down. We married in 1982 after a five-year courtship. Yes, Mac was not only a big part our talking, but the kinds of adventures we had—camping, tracking wildlife, river rafting and canoeing, attending Indigenous feast days and festivals, plus the many things that Kit made for our household—wooden, stone and ceramic utensils, custom fireplaces, porches with carved vigas, sculptures indoors and out—all these echoed the spirit in which Mac too had lived—bohemian, creative, connected with local cultures and creatures. And yes, in our forty-plus years of knowing each other, artworks and other objects made by Mac, Kit, and other artist-friends filled our homes. (Ed. note: Ann and Kit divorced in 2014 but remained close. Kit died after a fall in 2019.)

How often does a biographer write about their mother-in-law? Tell us about the special challenges involved in that undertaking.

Good question! When Navajo people see an oncoming dust devil (twister) in their path, someone is liable to shout out, “Eh, here comes your mother-in-law!” In other words, watch out, in-laws should be avoided! But seriously, because Mac and I didn’t meet and never had family roles, I suppose my job was easier than if she was looking over my shoulder. Keeping my narrative to the artist’s career meant I got to focus on a full spectrum of her work and moods—both light and dark, upbeat and brooding. She was a complicated person with many facets to explore. And, I had wonderful first-person source materials like letters, interviews, and reviews to draw from.

(I should add that during my marriage to Kit I also had a wonderful mother-in-law whom I knew in person—Marjorie Schweitzer (1928-2020) was his step-mother, his father John’s second wife; she was also a cultural anthropologist, a gerontologist, a friend and fine role model for me.)

Mac and her son Kit go on so many adventures together–just the two of them. She must have made a fantastic impression on him, and left a big hole in his life when she died. Tell us a little about your late husband, Kit.

Kit always said that as an artist’s son he couldn’t escape becoming an artist and yet he also said it was the last thing he wanted to become. In college, he first majored in anthropology but naturally gravitated toward studies of Indigenous and world arts. He received an MFA in Ceramics at Arizona State University and earned a living principally through gallery shows, first of pottery and, later, hand-built sculptures and fountains made of clay, ferro-concrete, metals, and other materials. For friends, family, and himself, he also made cast and inlaid jewelry, stringed musical instruments, telescopes with ground glass mirrors, wooden and ferro-concrete boats, a pair of geodesic domes as his first studio and home, and later straw-bale additions to our home and his studio. He loved making tools that made tools to make the objects that he wanted. He joked that he wanted to “make one of everything” and sometimes with his passions that wasn’t so far-fetched. Although he doubted it, I think his mother would have been hugely proud of the earnest, articulate mentor and creative, self-supporting artist he became. Naturally, I dedicate this book to Kit.

You’re a cultural anthropologist and an expert on Navajo weaving. How did that background translate to the task of writing a biography?

I’m the kind of anthropologist who collaborates and studies the ways of artists, past and present—my research focuses on the cultural bases and processes of creativity for artists and craftspeople. I write about who makers are, and how and why they create. I don’t think of my work as a biographer so much as a documenter of artistic careers. For instance, some of my books and articles put the work of Navajo and Pueblo weavers into sociocultural and historic perspective; another book of mine follows the career of an Anglo-American tapestry producer, Gloria Ross, who collaborated with abstract expressionist painters and expert weavers in the U.S. and Europe. Rediscovering Mac’s accomplishments as a successful painter was a thrilling process for me.

You write that Mac was “just horsey enough” not to be considered in the pantheon of great Southwest modernists such as O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin. Yet she was working in the landscape-to-abstraction trajectory that made other artists famous. How is this brilliant Arizona artist so unknown?

You’re right, Mac felt she was on a trajectory that she described as “on the path to abstraction.” Naturally drawn to the Modernist approach without naming it, Mac eventually rejected traditional realism, sought dramatic means to express herself, and experimented with many new forms. Her stylized figures, blocky and curved shapes, indigo and earthy tones, and varied media all form hallmarks of mid-century modern design.

In addition to Arizona venues, Mac exhibited her work at art museums in Cleveland, El Paso, Dallas, and Santa Fe; she showed paintings at galleries in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Beloit (Wisconsin), and Taos—all were venues that contributed to the rise of Modernism. Private collectors and several public institutions bought her work for their permanent collections during her lifetime. Although never wealthy, Mac succeeded as an independent artist who passionately made artmaking her primary focus.

Mac was indeed well known during her lifetime. When she died in 1962, the sting and stigma of a reputed suicide overshadowed her accomplishments and derailed her legacy. Without an agent or gallerist to champion her work, Mac’s remaining art stayed in the family and in other private collections, away from public view. Although she was prolific, few works have appeared on the open market since then. Had Mac lived longer, who knows what her legacy would now look like?

You faced a biographer’s dilemma in dealing with Mac’s death. A tragic death at an early age can propel an artist to fame, yet it also can eclipse their identity. You felt that all people remembered about Mac was a suicide. To complicate matters, you are not totally convinced it was a suicide. How did you handle those competing loyalties—to Mac, to her living family, to truth, to her reputation?

You’re right, I am personally not comfortable accepting Mac’s death as a suicide. I’ve come to this because of many factors, some raised in the book and some beyond its scope. Whatever happened, however, was a long time ago and in a remote place. I made a deliberate decision to focus, instead, on matters related directly to the artist’s career, and to emphasize her efforts and achievements that were overshadowed by the untimely death. The stories I tell reflect Mac’s artistic realities—her adventures and ambitions, friendships and rivalries, successes and challenges.

Do Navajo people you’ve met or worked with have memories of Mac or stories about her?

The Navajo Nation is a big place—I have worked mostly on the central and east sides around Window Rock, Ganado, Crystal, and Chinle, and Kit’s family lived at Navajo National Monument on the far northwest side. He contacted the Diné family with whom Mac was closest and shared copies of her home movies with them. He and they met several times and after he died, I also contacted them. They helped me identify family members in Mac’s photos but had little to recall except for a fondness for Mac and her young son and for the goods and services that Mac’s husband (as park superintendent) often provided them with. In fact, as many traditional Diné individuals might prefer, family members chose not to be specifically named in the book.

It feels like you knew Mac. While reading the book, it’s easy to forget that you did not. Did you feel like you really knew her by the end, or was she still Kit’s mysterious and glamorous mother?

I was fortunate to have so many resources that informed me about Mac—her own scrapbooks and letters, family archival records and photos, newspaper reports and reviews, interviews of key individuals by myself and others, and so forth. I won’t say that I truly feel I know Mac, but at least I have a keen sense of who she was, who she and others thought she was, what she liked and disliked, and how she might respond in varied situations. She is no longer mysterious or glamorous to me. In the end, I’d say that I now see Mac as smart, funny, stylish in a rustic way, hip in a mid-century way, shy yet social with those she knew—in short, a multi-dimensional being who might fit better into today’s more flexible society than she did in the forties and fifties. Moreover, I know that she was short—only 5’4”! Sometimes I think of her as my prickly would-be mother-in-law who might not take a liking to my 5’11” tall self who asks so many questions.

I liked the art critic foil Beatrice Edgerly! Oh, I just looked her up and she is pretty interesting too.

Yes, I was intrigued when I started finding her reviews buried in old newspapers, because Mac never clipped and scrapbooked them; she never sent them home to her family. Edgerly as nemesis shows that not everyone was a consistent Mac-fan, although she certainly had a large following. During her years in Arizona, not a single month went by without notices, photos, and reviews of her accomplishments in the state’s principal newspapers; and Edgerly was Mac’s only detractor. And, Mac never changed her ways because of a reviewer’s opinions!

What did you learn about Mac’s strengths that you would have wanted to convey to Kit?

How I wish that Kit had lived to see that Mac’s own words and actions reveal her as a forthright person and successful artist! Few of us ever see our parents as fully formed adults, right? We only see them through our child-filtered eyes. Kit always admitted that he only knew his mother into his teens and never knew her from an adult perspective.

I would want Kit to know how dedicated and inventive his mother was in pursuing her career, and how successful she was in receiving shows, awards, commissions, and jury invitations. He knew his mother to be single-minded, focused, and guarded, even selfish, about her artmaking, but he didn’t realize how that related to the outer world of success and where it led her career. In later years he believed that Mac took her life, at least in part, because she felt thwarted by a frustrating and unrewarding marketplace—he occasionally said that the art world’s indifference killed her. In contrast, the records I found show that her talent and ambitious efforts paid off—in the twenty years since her 1940 graduation, she took part in more than 150 events and honors throughout the Southwest and beyond, including many one-person and juried shows. Her work received eleven awards at the prestigious art shows of the Arizona State Fair in Phoenix. In 1954 she served there as the youngest and only female juror. Kit knew little of these accomplishments but as a self-supporting artist himself, he would have understood their importance to her.

Your book is an emotional psychological portrait of a talented woman in distress. What helped you to explore and understand this theme?

Finding Mac’s own strengths helped a lot—I found through her writings and actions that she was a clear champion of her freedoms despite a stressful marriage. In her final years she was making strides to continue building her artistic life between Tucson and the Navajo Nation. She made contributions to the art world that the notion of suicide later obscured in the public’s and her family’s eyes. My stories move away from a death that overshadowed her life and instead focus on this brilliant artist’s accomplishments.

My writing process became tremendously therapeutic as I grappled with the compound grief of losing Kit and my own mother in 2019, and my father in 2021. (At 74, Kit died several days after an accidental fall from a ladder; my parents died in their 90s from what we’d simply call “old age.”) Discovering Mac’s healthy ways of dealing with stress, her abilities to express herself, and the successful results of her ambitions helped me cope with her dilemmas and those losses. I discovered wonderful parallels between mother and son in many positive ways—their creative abilities to organize, experiment, dig deeply, and find energy to produce and market their work, and to resist societal norms and go their own quirky ways. Writing doesn’t make grief go away—I miss that man every day, but I felt he was often by my side as I researched and wrote. Plus, wonderful images constantly surrounded me at my desk—working with Mac’s art and endearing family photos was satisfying in its own extraordinary way!

Also, I am fortunate to have a new partner in my life who has been a huge help. Larry Ollivier is a poet and photographer who brings new creative dimensions into my writing process. Throughout the past three years, he has listened intently to me, puzzled through many mysteries with me, and made excellent editorial suggestions for me. The book features some of his black-and-white landscapes—special places in the Southwest where Mac lived and visited and where we have more recently camped and explored.

 

Link to Mac Schweitzer exhibition and book:

https://westernspirit.org/project/mac-schweitzer/

https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/mac-schweitzer